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Conservation buffer is a common practice to control diffuse water pollution, repair impaired streams, and restore the ecosystem functions of a damaged watershed. Practical questions concerning where conservation buffer should take place and how wide the buffers should be are common. The most common practice is to define the riparian areas and buffer width by stream proximity (i.e., a fixed distance from the stream). Reconstruction and/or preservation of riparian buffers along stream banks can be incorporated into the local land-use planning process by creating and implementing riparian buffer ordinances to control diffuse water pollution. The width of the stream buffer varies from 6.1 to 61 m (20 to 200 ft) in the buffer ordinances throughout the United States (Heraty 1993). The width chosen by a jurisdiction usually depends on the sensitivity and characteristics of the resource being protected and the political environment in the community.Abstract: Conservation buffer is a best management practice for repairing impaired streams and restoring ecosystem functions in degraded watersheds. This paper compares the cost-effectiveness of three conservation buffer placement strategies in the Raritan Basin in New Jersey. Three strategies are the fixed-width riparian buffer restoration strategy based on state and local regulatory rules, the variable-width riparian buffer restoration strategy based on a nonregulatory watershed protection initiative and the variable source area-based conservation buffer placement strategy derived from an alternative concept of watershed hydrology. The variable source area-based conservation buffer placement strategy targets the most hydrologically critical source areas in a watershed for buffer placement. A digital elevation model, land use, soil, and stream data are used to identify critical source areas for buffer placement. The results show there are only minor differences in the cost-effectiveness of the fixed-and variable-width riparian buffer restoration strategies and that variable source area-based buffer placement strategy is more cost effective than the fixed-and variable-width riparian buffer restoration strategies. The critical source areas for placing conservation buffers are useful information for local watershed management, soil and water conservation, and land use planning.

,The inconclusive and inconsistent findings of research on the agenda setting function of the mass media have stimulated a search for more precision in the measurement of mass media effects on public priorities and issue saliencies. This study suggests a rational for applying the broad concepts of agenda setting to specific political events.The general theory of agenda setting, first tested empirically by McCombs and Shaw,' posits a direct relationship between the media's coverage of important issues and the public's judgment of the relative importance of these issues. McCombs and Shaw's initial test of this relationship during the 1968 presidential campaign in Chapel Hill, N.C., indicated a strong correlation (+ .967) between the rank order of campaign issues in the media as determined by content analysis and the rank order of voters' independent judgments of the importance of the issues.2The original test of agenda setting and most of the subsequent research in its tradition3 have dealt with extremely broad public issues over relatively long periods of time. The use of extremely broad categories of issues may be an Achilles Heel of agenda setting since, as Murdoch notes, more specific categories seem to have decreased the correlations between media and public agendas.' Narrowing the focus of agenda setting to information about a specific political event at one point in time should provide a more rigorous test. Such nar-rowing limits intervening variables which might affect cognitions over time.If the media have an agenda setting effect, independent of inter-and intrapersonal variables, the effect should be apparent in this more controlled context. The use of a specific political event, in this case a local visit and speech by the President of the United States, requires a somewhat more microcosmic view of agenda setting than that found in most studies. This study sought to determine the effect of media coverage on audience knowledge about the event, and in this sense is similar to what McCombs calls the study of "attributes" of an issue.5 Cohen's study of an environmental issue6 and Benton and Frazier's study of levels of information holding about the economy7 are examples of such research but are not sufficiently limited in time to provide a precise test.On the other hand, McCombs, Becker and Weaver have argued that time itself may be an important prerequisite for agenda setting. They suggest that a period of several months may be neces-

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